The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

John Kennedy was fast learning that his personal and political interests were not necessarily the same as those of the thousands of men who worked in the government.

That McNamara’s role was major, that he was by default usurping the role of the Secretary of State, did not faze him. He was intelligent, forceful, courageous, decent, everything, in fact, but wise.

At his height he always seemed in control; you could, said Lyndon Johnson, who once admired him and trotted him out on so many occasions, almost hear the computers clicking away. But when things went sour and Johnson felt McNamara’s doubts, his tongue, always acid for those who failed him, did not spare his prize pupil. He would say to those around him, “I forgot he had only been president of Ford for one week.”

It was a very different time, the immediate post-Eisenhower years. The Chiefs, who were held over from the previous Administration (generals who believed in a more balanced posture, like Ridgway and Taylor, had been either winnowed out, or more or less ignored), were men who believed that nuclear war was a viable kind of military position; indeed, the entire American military posture was essentially based on a willingness to use nuclear weapons. That was an eerie-enough thought, and some people wanted to crawl away from it. Men such as Henry Kissinger, then of Harvard, had just made himself something of an intellectual reputation as a theoretician of tactical nuclear weapons (that is, finding something respectable between blowing up the world and being too soft), and there was thus something of a fad for tactical nuclear weapons.

He worked hard to bring greater control to the entire nuclear system. When he entered office he had found it surprisingly hair-trigger and chancy. The military had constructed a system in which the prime consideration was not control but getting the weapons into the air, no matter what; controls and safeguards were secondary. Even on the weapons themselves the safety features seemed marginal; there was, he decided, far too great a chance that one could go off in a crash, and he insisted on other safety features being added.

McNamara testifying on the Hill was not someone you wanted to cross. Yet he was unbending, he knew too many answers. The Hill didn’t like that. He was perhaps a little too smart, and when Southerners say someone is smart they are not necessarily being complimentary.

And if there were doubts about his sensitivity on some political issues, even his liberal critics found something admirable in him, his capacity to change, to follow the evidence and to keep his ego separated from his opinions.

The leadership was brilliant, indigenous, nationalist in the true sense, and in no way beholden to the American embassy.

was, in effect, the go-ahead signal for a coup (no one in Washington or Saigon thought Diem would ever drop the Nhus; if it had been unlikely before the crackdown, it was even more improbable now).

It was Robert Kennedy who had been primarily responsible for the counterinsurgency enthusiasm. Toughness fascinated him; he was not at ease with an America which had flabby waistlines. The enemy both at home and abroad was determined; we had to match that determination. If he worked until midnight, and on driving home saw the lights on in the offices of Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union, then he turned around and drove back to his office. The standard by which he judged men was how tough they were. Early in the Administration, when he was overwhelmed with speaking requests and was turning almost all of them down, he had received one from a Polish group. He immediately seized on it: “Let’s do this one. I like the Poles, they’re tough.”

The Americans in Vietnam, long frustrated by the ineptitude of their ARVN counterparts, and by the fact that ineptitude guaranteed career advancement, had come up with a slogan to describe the ARVN promotion system: “Fuck up and move up.” They did not realize that by now the slogan applied to their own Army as well.

“Rusk,” said someone at the White House who knew him well and liked and respected him, “was different from the rest of us. He was poor and we had not been, but he really was more of my father’s generation. You don’t show feelings, you don’t complain, you work very hard and you get ahead, and there was a sense that his mind was not his own property, that he was not allowed to let it take him where it wanted to go; there were instead limits to what you could think. Strict confines.”

Dean Rusk would, perhaps not surprisingly, cable his ambassadors to stop using the word feel in their cables; he was not interested in what they felt.

But Europe was the world: the Russians to be stopped there, the British held together and given a rest period, the French encouraged to be more worthy of us and their own past, the Germans to be re-created in our image. The French were perhaps the most troublesome, surprisingly unstable for a major European power, insisting always on being French. The underdeveloped world was not a serious place.

The day after the decision was announced, the New York Times commented editorially: “We cannot ask France to sacrifice for Indochina, merely then to give it up. Neither can we dictate terms to France, because we are not prepared to step in. Indochina is critical—if it falls, all of Southeast Asia will be in mortal peril.” All of this, of course, was before Korea.

At the very time that they were talking about keeping their options open, they were closing them off. They were not questioning the given or the assumption of Vietnam; they were determining that the country would stand, like it or not, able to stand or not. They were not distinguishing between Communism in Vietnam and why it was successful and the exterior Communist threat to other countries in the region. And they were not analyzing to what degree the people of South Vietnam did or did not sustain the Vietcong. McNamara made his assessments in a vacuum, and the kind of challenge to them that might have taken place was absent.

In addition, the study showed that there would be a considerable international outcry if the United States bombed the North, that this would seem a disproportionate response to what the North was doing in the South (which reflected a feeling that few Americans had, about how repugnant bombing was to the rest of the world, since much of it had been bombed, while America had done some of the bombing but had never been bombed itself), and that while this would not pose a serious problem if quick success was achieved, it would become sticky if the war became drawn out, as it was likely to be.

But in the overall intelligence estimate, the arrival of the military shifted the weight of the study. CIA was neutral and compromised in order to have a finished piece of paper and the political people were brought down to a minority viewpoint, largely footnoting their dissent. The crucial factor was that the President would ask, What is the vote? and the vote would be yes, the bombing would do it. Thus did the government protect its capacity to go against its own wisdom and expertise.

At thirty-six, he was young enough to see that the commitment was not working and would not work but old enough to be tied to the past, to believe in it, in the necessity of stopping Communism, the belief that we were better than the Communists everywhere in the world, and in addition, that it would be a terrible thing if a large part of Asia were closed off to us.

The strength of a man put him off, but his weaknesses attracted him; it meant a man could be used.

It is one of the sad aspects about great flatterers like Lyndon Johnson that among the few things they are vulnerable to is flattery.

As he rose to higher and higher positions he resorted to greater and greater flattery, finding that few resisted it or were offended by it and that, indeed, most people accepted it as God’s truth.

Johnson did not like the free flow, and did not reach down to younger men in the various offices. He believed that youth in itself was a sign of inexperience.

One reason the principals were always surprised by this, and irritated by the failure of their programs, was that the truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a revolutionary war, and that the other side held title to the revolution because of the colonial war which had just ended. This most simple fact, which was so important to the understanding of the political calculations (it explained why their soldiers would fight and die, and ours would not; why their leaders were skillful and brave, and ours were inept and corrupt), entered into the estimates of the American intelligence community and made them quite accurate. But it never entered into the calculations of the principals, for a variety of reasons; among other things to see the other side in terms of nationalism or as revolutionaries might mean a re-evaluation of whether the United States was even fighting on the right side.

The Americans were tempting history by ignoring it; after all, in the past they had been able to dominate events by the sheer force of their industrial capacity, which had exempted them from much of the reality of the world.

The civilians always thought they were smarter than the military and understood them better than the military understood the civilians; the reverse was true, in fact; the military always read the civilians better.

we get into this war I know what’s going to happen. Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they’re going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like Stennis and Gross. They hate this stuff, they don’t want to help the poor and the Negroes but they’re afraid to be against it at a time like this when there’s been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they’ll like the war. They’ll take the war as their weapon. They’ll be against my programs because of the war. I know what they’ll say, they’ll say they’re not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating the Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor.” It was, said a man who was with him that night, eerie listening to him speak, like being with a man who has a premonition of his own death.

Men were activists, doers, who conquered business empires, who acted instead of talked, who made it in the world of other men and had the respect of other men. Boys were the talkers and the writers and the intellectuals, who sat around thinking and criticizing and doubting instead of doing.

Just so there would be no mistake about it, Johnson called in the White House reporters who were with him on the Ranch and told them, “Boys, I’ve just reminded Hubert that I’ve got his balls in my pocket.” There would be additional reminders to come.

Slipping in the first troops was an adjustment, an asterisk really, to a decision they had made principally to avoid sending troops, but of course there had to be protection for the airplanes, which no one had talked about at any length during the bombing discussions, that if you bombed you needed airfields, and if you had airfields you needed troops to protect the airfields, and the ARVN wasn’t good enough.

The Americans, particularly the military, were so straight and Westy was the classic example; he was so American, like all Americans in Vietnam he wanted the Vietnamese to be Americans, he saw them in American terms, he could never seem to see them as themselves.

(There is the classic Airborne story about a general inspecting Airborne troops. “And do you like to jump out of planes, soldier?” asks the general. “No, sir,” answers the trooper. “Then why are you here?” “Because I like to be around men who do,” answers the trooper.)

“In my view the positive approach is the key to success . . . and it’s the one that has a strong influence over people. Men welcome leadership. They like action and they relish accomplishment . . . speculation, knowledge is not the chief aim of man—it is action . . . all mankind feel themselves weak, beset with infirmities, and surrounded with danger. The acutest minds are the most conscious of difficulties and dangers. They want above all things a leader with the boldness, decision, and energy that with shame, they do not find in themselves.

If there were those on Johnson’s staff who did not think that Fortas was a man of any real political sensitivity, nonetheless he was the kind of man Johnson admired: he was a liberal without being a do-gooder, a man of force who got things done without showing softness.

In December 1965 McNamara began drawing up the plans for the military budget for fiscal 1967, a budget which would run from the middle of 1966 to the middle of 1967 and which would go to the Congress in January 1966. By this time he had already consulted with Westmoreland and had his darkest fears confirmed—Hanoi was reinforcing at a faster rate than we were; it would be a large war, and quite likely a long one. Westmoreland’s July 1965 estimates that we would need only 300,000 troops by the end of 1966 had been discarded; the approved figure was now 400,000 Americans by the end of 1966, and a probable figure of 600,000 by the end of 1967. Yet in making the budget, McNamara made the arbitrary assumption that the war would be over by June 30, 1967. It was in direct contradiction to the estimates he was getting from Westmoreland (and in direct contradiction to his own private estimates for Johnson at the time) but it was a plausible assumption for planning.

At this point the Council began meeting with McNamara and pushing him hard to get a more exact estimate of the cost, and also to get him to push for a tax increase. But they found McNamara, usually so sure, usually so filled with certitudes, very reluctant to come down with a hard figure for the cost of the war, and he gave three figures: high, low and medium. The high was $17 billion (or $7 billion over the original estimate), the medium was $15 billion, the low was $11 billion. Eventually the figure came to $21 billion, which meant that even his own medium private re-estimate for the increase was off more than 100 percent, and his estimate as far as the general public was concerned was off even more. He was not, it would turn out, quite so good a manager as he had claimed, nor his machine quite so efficient, though this did not necessarily make him any more modest.

Similarly, in late 1967 Tom Wicker of the New York Times went to see Robert McNamara. When the subject of the economic miscalculation of the war came up during the interview, McNamara dismissed it in a casual way which shocked Wicker. “Do you really think that if I had estimated the cost of the war correctly, Congress would have given any more for schools and housing?” he asked.

Johnson, aware of the mood and the criticism of him, the highly personal nature of it, told friends, “The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine is that I am alive and it has been more torturous.”

Slowly, cautiously, painfully, Clifford forced Johnson to turn and look honestly at the war; it was an act of friendship for which Johnson could never forgive him.